THE question of provincial autonomy never ceases to give the appearance of looking like an issue that the federal government talks about but never wants to really settle. The federal government appears so obsessed with exercising its own power that it doesn’t want to share it with the provinces, even when some of the provincial governments happen to be its stooges.

More than a quarter of a century of military rule and the extinction of democratic practices have damaged the concept of provincial autonomy. The military itself commands total autonomy and wants the federal government to look with scepticism at provincial demands for powers.

For more than a year, the Musharraf government has been talking every other day of deciding the autonomy question and has also placed the issue before parliament and parliamentary committees.

Punjab doesn’t bother about the problem because it is not worried about autonomy and knows that it owns a majority of the military’s personnel: it does what it wants without the federal government bothering about it. Its present government is in favour of projects that other provinces oppose because these will subjugate their autonomy — big dams, for instance.

The nationalists in Balochistan are wedded to the concept of regional autonomy, but they are kept in place because the federal government doesn’t like Baloch nationalism and wants to run the province likes its colonial set up. The parliamentary committee on Balochistan is headed by the PML boss, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, who belongs to Punjab, and it has been revived again after being pushed into the background by the armed uprising in the province led by Sardar Akbar Bugti, who was murdered by the military.

The committee has some opposition members on its panel, but they have not been attending it in protest for some time. Syed Mushahid Hussain, PML secretary-general, who also belongs to Punjab, and Senator Wasim Sajjad (from the same province) are now supposed to persuade opposition members of the committee to take part in its deliberations after Eid. How Gwadar has been developed and exploited without consulting the Balochistan government and Baloch representatives itself is seen as a point of alienation.

The National Reconstruction Bureau, also headed by a gentleman from Punjab, Mr Daniyal Aziz, has made some autonomy recommendations and sent them to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. But he seems to be somewhat sceptical and has said that the provincial governments themselves often prefer to entrust the federal government with responsibilities to act.

There is also an inter-provincial coordination committee that is headed by Mr Salim Saifullah from the Frontier. It is said to be involved in drafting consensus proposals and looking at the recommendations made by the National Reconstruction Bureau. Was it the bureau’s boss who reportedly said in a television discussion the other day that provinces were unnecessarily in favour of letting the federation have greater freedom to decide on issues?

So more meetings are planned and efforts are to be made to somehow get opposition members to associate themselves with the decisions to be taken to empower the provinces. With elections coming up, will the opposition parties bother about seconding the federal government’s autonomy changes and precedents? This seems unlikely, and therefore we have got through the current parliamentary period without taking up the amendments of the Constitution that concern the rights, both financial and administrative, of the provinces. It is possible that the PML will want to prove that it is keen to give autonomy proposals to the provinces so that it can use this for garnering winning votes at a time when the PPP and the PML-N may try to gather more support. But that the opposition will be able to play along with the PML is difficult to accept.

Let’s look in this context at a small problem bothering Sindh. Neither the Sindh chief minister nor his MQM allies seem ready to pick up any controversy about Sindh’s provincial rights. As long as the MQM can control the cities which it rules, it doesn’t appear to be too concerned about the autonomous rights of the Sindhis. Chief Minister Arbab Rahim also doesn’t want to pick a fight with the federal government, but certainly he has been worried about the way the Port Qasim Authority acts independently, at the call of the federal government, without consulting the provincial authorities.

The province’s small autonomy rights at least give it rights on the land that is located here, or doesn’t it? The two islands off Karachi that have been sold off by the federal government to a foreign firm for development as a city, Bundal and Buddo, have created a worrying strain in Sindh government officials and they know that the Sindhi fishermen living on the islands are being forced out and their land seized as part of the new scheme.

The fishermen’s associations have been outspoken in their criticism of the islands’ capture. The federal government didn’t bother much about what the fishermen were saying or the demonstrations they were staging that were backed also by many civil society organisations. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz likes Gulf and other foreign concerns to come and invest in Pakistan, and he isn’t too bothered about the rights of those living in areas that might be taken over.

Now, on Monday, he tried to mollify the fishermen and their supporters by saying in Karachi that the Port Qasim Authority, the Sindh government and the federal government would discuss the issue of the two islands and consult legal experts. He hoped that everyone would get his/her just rights. So a way will be found out to somehow compensate the fishermen affected and put pressure on them to vacate the sites needed by the construction companies.

The Port Qasim Authority will definitely get precedence over what the Sindh government, or at least some elements in it, may think. (Does anyone know of the tall fountain that the Port Qasim Authority and the KPT had built off Clifton? Is it still being enjoyed on these winter evenings by ordinary citizens? At what remains its running cost?) If the president, Gen Pervez Musharraf, hasn’t seen too much of the hardships being created by the islands’ takeover, he might want to undertake a full investigation into the problem.

The provinces also can sometimes act indifferent to the need for their rights to control their affairs. This is of course true of a faithful lackey like the Punjab government and also of the governments in Balochistan and Sindh: in the latter cases, those in power owe their positions to Gen Musharraf and don’t want to act as rebels, although their hearts may be, in the case of some leaders, on the side of their people.

In the case of a provincial leadership like that of the Frontier, they want to exercise whatever autonomy they have to push conservative In some instances, a project may actually be interpreted as being necessary for the country’s progress. The Gwadar Port may be part of this picture and most people might consider the federal government to be suitably empowered to deal with it. But if the Balochistan government is bypassed, it will not dare to say that it should be consulted because after all it owes its existence to Gen Musharraf.

The NRB has a theoretical approach. In its summary of federalism proposals, it recommends many things that look like cliches. It proposes the non-binding review of money bills, procedure for reconsideration of laws, National Finance Commission and NFC award on the basis of revised divisible pool and criteria, transfer of certain taxes to provinces, Council of Common Interests, composition, and a role related to Federal Legislative List Part II, water supplies and dams, etc. etc. It also proposes the devolution of financial authority.

It may have provided details to some of those concerned — the induction of the Council of Common Interests is a positive suggestion — but most of its recommendations are bland abstractions, and political parties must assert themselves and ensure that it is they and civil organisations concerned with the issue as well as elected political governments that deal with the question of autonomy rather than a sarkari set-up like the NRB. That may help to prevent the current use of the autonomy question as a plaything.

IN world politics, 2007 may be the year of realism. If that means getting rid of dangerous illusions, it’s a good thing. If it means abandoning idealism, it’s a bad thing. In the way of things, it will probably mean some of both.

Back in 2002, a senior adviser to President Bush told the journalist Ron Suskind that people in “the reality-based community” — journalists, for example — had got it seriously wrong. “That’s not the way the world really works any more,” the adviser said. “We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.”

So, while ignoring the reality-based evidence for global warming, and relying on what wits described as “faith-based intelligence” for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bushies set about transforming the world through a democratic revolution kick-started by the use of force. The empire struck.

Five years on, the reality has struck back. As we move into 2007, all the talk is of sobering realities — Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change and global economics. This is a positive development. At least we have got our feet back on the ground, even if the ground is hotter than it used to be. On climate change, I see the beginning of a big shift. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, writing in the Economist’s ‘World in 2007’, puts climate change top of his list of global challenges. “Global warming is a reality and portends a dire future for us all, should insufficient action be taken,” says John McCain, the leading Republican contender to succeed Bush as president. Insufficient action will be taken in 2007, you can be sure of that, but at least the reality is no longer denied.

A similar realism can be seen in relation to the Middle East. Even Bush is no longer pretending that “we’re winning” in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group (ISG) has reaffirmed the centrality of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to the future of the West’s relations with the Arab and Muslim world. Even if the Bush administration is not prepared to talk directly to Iran and Syria, the idea of crusading against an ostracised “axis of evil” is comprehensively discredited.

Of the three alleged members of that axis, Iraq is now more of a recruiting ground for terrorists than it was five years ago, North Korea has nuclear weapons and Iran is stronger than ever. So much for a faith-based foreign-policy.

Unfortunately, this new realism comes packaged with an older realism, or realpolitik — an approach, last seen in the administration of Bush Sr, which insists you must take your allies where you find them and not worry too much about the way they treat their subjects. The national interest, and the West’s economic and security interests, justify good relations with friendly autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. James Baker, co-chair of the ISG, and Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to Bush Sr, are leading representatives of this approach. Although Bush Jr is resisting this return of the father, the trend in Washington is clearly from Bush II back towards Bush I.

A country to watch in tracking this trend is Iran. Before the invasion of Iraq, we wanted two things from Iran. First, to slow down, and preferably halt, its nuclear programme. And, second, to speed up the process of domestic political change, leading to more respect for human rights, pluralism and, eventually, democracy. Now we want three things from Tehran: those two plus its help in stabilising Iraq, through its influence with the Shia majority there. Iran is stronger and more hostile, yet we want more from it. There is no way we will get all three at once. So which area will the West go soft on in 2007? I bet it will be human rights and democratisation.

Signs of the new old realism are also to be found in the policy of the West’s most articulate serving exponent of idealistic liberal internationalism, Tony Blair. Recently, London rolled out the red carpet for the friendly dictator of Kazakhstan. In southern Iraq, British troops are preparing their withdrawal, leaving something well short of democracy.

In Dubai before Christmas, Blair said that in the struggle against terrorism, and facing the threat from Iran, we must strengthen our ties with “moderate”, albeit authoritarian, Arab states. Challenged about the authoritarian character of the United Arab Emirates — where, in recent elections to an advisory council, just one per cent of citizens were allowed to vote — Blair told the Financial Times: “It’s got to move at its own pace, but the direction is very clear.”

I’m waiting for someone to pen a new version of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous article of 1979, ‘Dictatorships and double standards’, in which she argued that friendly, anti-Soviet, rightwing autocracies should be treated differently from pro-Soviet, leftwing totalitarian regimes. Double standards? Yes, please. Today, a friendly autocracy will be defined partly by its positioning in the struggle with jihadist terrorism and partly by its readiness to sell its energy and natural resources to the West. Since China is competing for those resources and does not give a damn about the human rights records of its suppliers, our capacity to impose political conditions on our suppliers is correspondingly reduced.

What should this policy be called? Most people have forgotten that Bush Jr came to power in 2001 preaching a “new realism”, in contrast to what he pilloried as the unfocused, liberal idealist interventionism of the Clinton years. However, after the 9/11 attacks and especially in his second term, he came to advocate a breathtakingly idealist policy of global democratisation.

The American political writer Robert Kagan described Bush’s new approach as a “higher realism”. So that was the new new realism. Now we have the new new new realism, or new realism. If new realism had an unrealistically large admixture of idealism, believing that democracy would spread across the Middle East as it had across Eastern Europe after 1989, new realism risks swinging back to the opposite extreme, making the old mistake of believing that a durable order can be built on friendly autocracies. So let us indeed have a reality-based international community in 2007, but let’s not have too much realism. In the long run, nothing could be less realistic. — Dawn/Guardian Service